Joel Connelly: Obama puts 8th District on the front Burner

Hitting his 25th city in the last two weeks, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., delivered a check to House hopeful Darcy Burner, and said Republicans are “trying to scare the bejesus out of the electorate.”

Obama gently lampooned the rush of negative, last-minute TV commercials that the GOP has poured into Senate and House races, many in districts considered safe Republican turf until a few weeks ago.

“They’re trying the same playbook: It’s falling flat this time,” Obama told a fundraising breakfast for the state Democratic Party. “It’s causing some head scratching, I’m sure, in Karl Rove’s office.”

Rove, President Bush’s political brain, paid a recent fundraising visit to the district for Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., who is being hard-pressed by the self-starting Burner.

A former Microsoft manager, Burner has raised more than $2.4 million in the contest for Washington’s 8th District, an Eastside constituency that has voted Republican in all 12 elections since it was created in 1980.

Obama is also in town for a sold-out Benaroya Hall lecture to promote his new book “The Audacity of Hope” (Crown, $25).

He reflected on the last five years in American politics. “We rallied around the president after 9-11,” he said. “We all supported going into Afghanistam. But after spending a half-trillion dollars in Iraq, and the blood of thousands of Americans, we’re less secure.”

Obama, 45, perhaps the Democrats’ brightest young face, showed that he still knows how to act like an old Chicago pol.

“Those of you who haven’t maxed out (given the maximum contribution allowable under federal law), go ahead and get over it,” he asked Democrats gathered at the Washington Athletic Club in downtown Seattle.

But Obama also preached a message that the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley used to deliver: Organization, repeat, organization. He noted Republicans’ 72-hour program that has turned out the vote in the 2002 and 2004 elections.

“We have to match them door to door, phone call to phone call,” he said.